Growth Spurt Hits Lake County

Lake County is Florida's No. 1 ''sleeper'' in terms of opportunity for real estate investment, the chief economist for a South Florida research company believes.

The county is the sixth-fastest-growing market the state in terms of the number of new residents settling there each year, said Tom Powers, an economist with Goodkin Research Corp. of Fort Lauderdale.

Powers said he believes the county will increasingly become a ''bedroom community'' for metropolitan Orlando, especially for people working in Orange and Seminole counties. (Osceola County also is part of the metropolitan area.) He said his analysis also indicated that Seminole County's population growth may be slowing.

Powers calculated the number of people who moved to or left each of the state's counties by analyzing Internal Revenue Service data culled from tax returns. The data included numbers of dependents and similar information but did not include data such as income or street addresses, he said.

In 1984, the latest year for which figures were available, 18,052 people moved to Lake County and 7,376 moved away, Powers said, for a net gain of 10,676.

A growing number of those moving to the county are coming from congested areas in metropolitan Orlando, the economist said.

''Some people are being pushed out by growth,'' Powers said. ''South Seminole County originally attracted people because it was a sedate, quiet suburban area. Now, it's anything but that.''

Lake County is going to grow faster than people think, Powers said. That bodes well for investors who make their move early in the cycle, particularly those willing to commit their money to long-term investments, he said.

Powers said the figures on in-migration -- movement of people from one region to another -- pointed to significant opportunities for new-home builders and other developers, while the out-migration figures indicated that there were opportunities for such businesses as existing-home brokers. The total migrating population, both in and out, is a pool of opportunity for such businesses as mortgage lending, the economist said.

Positive net migration fuels economic growth, he said. An area may grow naturally, with births outnumbering deaths, but significant growth can occur only when the people moving to an area outnumber those leaving, Powers said.

Jack Matsche, a Lake County home builder for more than 30 years, said Friday that investors' and developers' interest in the county is definitely on the rise.

There has been more outside interest in Lake County in the past year than in the past three decades, he said.

Others in Lake County also said they were not surprised to hear that the area is considered to be the hottest in the state for investments.

''I've been saying that since the freezes,'' Lake County commissioner Claude Smoak said. ''We've been growing overall in every direction.''

Smoak said the county needs a development plan because the killer freezes of the past few years have opened thousands of acres formerly in citrus to possible development. Last month, Smoak proposed placing a moratorium on mobile-home developments because of the preponderence of parks in the county. Keith Shamrock, a Eustis Realtor, said the county needs a centralized sewer and water system to capitalize on its growth potential.

Powers said there are indications that Lake County is developing some pockets of wealth. For instance, 8,000 copies of The Wall Street Journal are delivered to residents in the Mount Dora area each day, and 15,000 copies of either Forbes or Fortune magazines are delivered each month.

Seminole County, among the state's fastest growing in recent years, showed about an equal amount of in-migration and out-migration in 1983 and a net loss of about 6,000 people in 1984, Powers said.

If the flow of people into Seminole County has slowed or reversed direction, it is clearly significant for retailers and shopping-center developers, the economist said.

Mark Sievers, a planner with the East Central Florida Regional Planning Council, said Friday that he thinks Seminole County's population is growing as strongly as ever. Population-growth estimated by the University of Florida's Bureau of Business and Economic Research showed the county growing by about 13,000 from 1983 to 1984 and by more than 15,000 each year between 1984 and this year.